


My Body is a Graveyard

by Kittenlzlz



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Boba Fett Needs A Hug, Canon Compliant, Catharsis, Character Study, Clone troopers (mentioned) - Freeform, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Introspection, Jango Fett (mentioned) - Freeform, Loneliness, Self-Discovery, Self-Doubt, at least till book of boba comes out, learning to love yourself
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-27
Updated: 2021-01-27
Packaged: 2021-03-13 15:48:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29031189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kittenlzlz/pseuds/Kittenlzlz
Summary: Boba fett grows up, and outlives all the men that share his face. A study of Boba, grief, and learning to live.
Relationships: Boba Fett & Jango Fett
Comments: 11
Kudos: 43





	My Body is a Graveyard

Boba is seven and sick: miserable even as a cool hand brushes hair from his sweaty forehead and murmurs soothing words into his curls. His body is chilled and burning by turns, his limbs sluggish with exhaustion no matter how he fights, and he barely registers them as his. He looks up into eyes that match his own, sees the frustration in them slowly soften as he leans into the large hand cupping his face. Boba worries that he is not growing as fast as his father expected, as he has seen his brothers do. He worries about his tendency to get sick when the others stay healthy. It makes him different, makes him special to his father, but he wonders when disappointment will outweigh the love he sees in their shared earth-dark eyes.

Boba is nine and his father holds a silver helmet on his hip while their foreheads press together briefly. Boba has those last few seconds to memorize the lines of his fathers face - the sharp cheekbones that his own will grow into, the scars he does not have - and hopes his father will be home on time from this bounty. He watches as brown skin and crow's feet disappear beneath stiff metal, and his father heads out the door. A hundred thousand identical brothers - better, stronger, faster than him - train and live together hallways away. But he sits alone, and waits.

Boba is ten and lost in a sea of sand. The smell of burning plasma fades around him as blaster shots turn to shouts for medics, the groans of the fallen, and the creak of broken droids. Boba is ten and kneels beside his father’s body, trembling hands reaching for his father’s helmet. He’d seen the flash of a lightsaber as it burned through metal and reached the vulnerable skin underneath. He’d seen his own face reflected in multitudes and buried under white plastoid as his brothers fought alongside the Jedi that killed his father. He is ten and he thinks of shared eyes and a warm scarred forehead resting against his own, of moments between helmeted jobs where that face creased with smiles. He thinks of hands - so much larger than his own but the same sturdy bone structure - showing him how to hold a blaster, pulling him along as he passed his faceless, nameless brothers.

Boba is ten, and presses his forehead to cool metal, and swears that this face, the face of his father, will be the last one the Jedi see.

Boba is eleven, twelve, thirteen, and the Republic falls with the Jedi. He stops counting somewhere between the blurring stars and the grubby ports where he practices his deepening voice. He keeps his father’s ship and bounces from bounty to bounty, watching white helmeted troopers and wondering what face might be hidden beneath their armour. If he’d recognize it, or if it had been taken along with their loyalty and aim. He hides his own beneath freshly painted green, and averts his eyes. Long nights in hyperspace brings him dreams of his father’s face, his own face, becoming lost in the white sea of helmets. He stays further away from the blank, uncanny, shells of his brothers after that. Time passes, uncounted, and while the troopers become more common, less of them fit the armor, and he relaxes at the flashes of different skin tones. He very carefully doesn’t think about what that might mean. His father is already dead, and his brothers were nothing but pale imitations. That now their stumbling corpses are finally rotting means nothing to him.

Boba is tall, broad, and armored enough to step into cantinas unchallenged; his voice is deep enough to order drinks unquestioned. He is also alone. There is no one to tell him how much is too much, no one to hold his hair back from his clammy forehead as he vomits in a grimy fresher or to steady him as he shakes. The mirror mocks him as he leans against the filth covered wall and breathes, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. The sallow, bloodless face looking back at him through the cracked glass looks nothing like his father. His hair is plastered down from fever sweat and from hours spent in his helmet, and in the sterile lights of the fresher he looks sickly, too thin and too young. There is none of the warm life he remembers being in his fathers face (in his brothers); None of the laughter in his eyes or hidden care in his expression. There’s only exhaustion and acne. He tries to trace his cheekbones, find familiarity in their path, but he cannot remember the curve of his father’s face. He shakes as he finds he cannot clearly picture anything beyond the earthen toned-riches of their shared eyes. Even the crinkle of his father’s smile is obscured by time and grief, precious memories flinched away from, left untouched for so long that they had faded and blurred. Boba cannot stop the tears that trickle down his cheeks or the ugly wrenching sobs that start to build in his chest. He’s older now than any of his brothers lived to be, even though he barely looks the age they had appeared when they marched towards their deaths. Compared to his father, to them, he seems and feels a child, and wishes desperately for a brother, for his father. For one of them to come stand by his side, just for a little longer, to help him find his way.

Boba has been a man for more years than he ever expected to live, when he pauses while shaving and recognises the face looking back. It is not his - it has never been his. Older than his brothers had ever had the chance to look (much less live to be), reflecting the extra years he got that they didn’t, it is his father holding the razor to his throat. He has spent nights agonizing over the remnants of his past, over the fragments of his father that he remembers. Has hated himself for losing pieces of that face: for forgetting its curves, the crinkles of its eyes and smile. Suddenly all that he’s lost is looking back at him. His reflection is shocked and hesitant, none of the softness or grim quiet he remembers seeing in his father’s face. Shaking, he lifts a finger and gingerly traces a line from his forehead to eyebrow, where a piece of shrapnel had once just missed his father’s eye. Swallows harshly as he thinks of other scars, other tattoos and names he’s let fade from his memory more purposefully, when he’d even bothered to learn them in the first place. There are legions of ghosts reflected back at him, and none of them are kindly.

Boba drops the razor and puts his helmet back on.

Boba feels old in his bones when he next steels himself to see that face again. Acid-scarred and sun-aged, he has kept his habit of glancing away from reflective surfaces, certain now that his haunted reflection will be even less bearable. However, his freshly repainted helmet sits only a few feet away, and the hum of hyperspace curls around his ship: he is safe here, he has a purpose. So he dares to lock eyes with his mirror image. Shock is a thrill as he sees a stranger in place of his father. The man in his reflection is older than Jango ever grew to be; ancient when compared to his brothers, and... different. The military buzz many of his ghosts had favoured is nowhere in sight, instead pale, scarred flesh stripes across his head, the ruined skin refusing to regrow dark curls. Crows feet line his eyes and while they are familiar, what he sees reflected in his eyes is not. Still dark and clear but older, calmer, than he’s ever seen them. He is older than Jango was at his death, and aged further still by the harsh galaxy and the disregard he has treated his body with. It just never felt like it was truly his after all. But now he swallows, hesitant and hopeful all at once, as he stares down at the crude matter that is his self. Because for once he sees the gentle present instead of the aching past.

Bonus:  
Boba is settled into himself, knows what his future holds, when he tips Bib Fortuna’s body off the throne with Fennec at his side. There’s no one paying him, but also no one holding the end of his leash. For once in his life he feels himself, and in control of his own decisions. Boba Fett is a name feared in its own right.

He leaves the helmet on, as he faces the rest of Jabba’s old court. But only because some have yet to put their blasters down.

**Author's Note:**

> I originally wrote this at 3am after disassociating in the shower and it took so much editing to get here (THANKYOU EHCANUCK). I just had lots of feelings about self worth and love and wow boba would have lots of issues from being a clone but not wouldn't he.  
> hmu on tumblr at [Kittenlzlz](https://kittenlzlz.tumblr.com/)


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